Using Green Materials and Supply Chains to Make Sustainable Products

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One of the hurdles to making sustainable products is figuring out what the term sustainability means for different materials and ingredients.

Jason Pearson, president and CEO of GreenBlue, a research and design institute, spoke with GreenBiz Radio about how companies are using metrics such as recyclability and renewable energy when determining the quality of products, and what efforts are underway to make cleaner supply chains.

Jason will be presenting at GreenBiz.com's Greener by Design conference June 12-13.

Jonathan Bardelline: How are companies rethinking or changing the ingredients and materials in their products, with a focus on sustainability?

Jason Pearson: Well let's start with the question of rethinking their products from the perspective of sustainability, and then talk a little bit about ingredients specifically. As you may know, what GreenBlue does as an organization in the world is work with leadership companies by industry sector or product category to try to help them move toward more sustainable solutions for their products and services.

Currently, we work in three areas: packaging, cleaning products, and building products and materials. And probably the best example of how companies are rethinking their work in relation to sustainability, I can draw some our work running the Sustainable Packaging Coalition.

What we see there is that the companies that are engaged in the Packaging Coalition, as members are, first and foremost, interested in what this term sustainability means. And what we find, whether we're working in packaging, cleaning products or any product category is the term means something different, depending on the product category you're talking about, and then more specifically, the context of use for a particular product.

And the way that we help companies understand that is by talking in terms of metrics, and most companies that we work with are familiar with conventional business metrics for products like cost, performance, appearance, sometimes regulatory compliance. And those are metrics that they use to measure their performance, and to define quality for their products and to compare themselves to their competitors.

What we see happening in this area of practice that gets called sustainability is that a range of new metrics are getting added to the consideration or, really, to the definition of quality.

So, a range of new metrics or new attributes are getting added to the definition of quality for different types of products. So, in the case of packaging, it's no longer good enough for a package to be, to perform well on cost, performance and appearance, and regulatory compliance, but customers of that package, customers who are going to see that package, wherever they are in the supply chain are increasingly asking questions about whether the package is recyclable, whether the materials that are in that package are safe and healthy for people and the environment, whether the energy used to make that package was renewable energy and whether the use of that energy was efficient in every stage in the lifecycle.

All those questions are really new metrics, new aspects of the definition of quality packaging. And so, getting back to your question of how are companies rethinking what they're doing, the way that we understand what's happening is that companies are adding new metrics to their definition of quality or performance, and as they add their new, those new metrics, they're needing to build up their research capacity and their understanding of those new issues in order to be able to perform well and to compete with their competitors in the marketplace.

The key points that we often make to the private sector is exactly that, that while at one time these new metrics or these new issues might have looked to companies exclusively like a challenge that they wanted to avoid, increasingly companies are seeing these new metrics or these new issues as opportunities for innovation and opportunities for competitive differentiation, so that just as a company can differentiate its product on the basis of cost or performance or appearance, they can now also differentiate their product on the basis of recyclability, intrinsic material health, use of renewable energy, fair labor practices within their facilities or along their supply chain, and that those factors actually matter in the marketplace, and can prove to be a competitive advantage in that marketplace.

So, that's a very high level answer to the question of how we see companies rethinking what they do, in terms of what is getting called sustainability, and I would say that we don't find the term sustainability that useful as a technical term. It's useful as a general term to describe this group of new metrics that are being added to the consideration of quality, but the group of metrics varies, depending on product category, so it doesn't, the definition of sustainability doesn't really remain stable at the product level across different product categories. Our job, in some cases, is simply to define what sustainability means for different product categories or different product sectors.

So, now, getting to the second aspect of your question, which was the question of materials in products or in packages, in a way, that same way of thinking, that thinking in terms of metrics and what attributes matter, applies also at the scale of what ingredients go into materials, and what materials go into products. And I'll give you an example from one of our other projects, a project called CleanGredients, which is a database that we've been developing which is an ingredient database of cleaning products and chemicals, so it's a database of chemicals that could be used to make cleaning products. The role of the database is to sit in the supply chain of chemicals between companies that make chemicals and companies that use chemicals. So, some of the companies that make chemicals might be companies like BASF, or Dow or Dupont, who are making chemicals that they then want to sell to companies like Ecover or Seventh Generation or Sysco, who are going to mix those chemicals together to make a cleaning product.

The formulator companies, the Ecovers, the Seventh Generation, those companies that mix chemicals together are trying to find chemicals they can use, that when they complete the product, that product can then be a safe and healthy product, or what would get called in the marketplace, a green product or a sustainable product. The challenge for those formulator companies to find good ingredients to put into their cleaning products, and the job of our database, is to provide a listing of ingredient chemicals that they could use in their cleaning products.

The reason I say that the attribute-based approach is still relevant is that just as I can't say there's any such thing as a sustainable package or a sustainable product, because that definition varies by context and different attributes matter from different contexts. In the same way, when you look at a chemical that goes into a cleaning product, the cleaning product might be made up of seven or eight or nine different types of chemicals.

Some of those types of chemicals might be surfactants, solvents, fragrances. Each of those classes of chemicals is different and has different characteristics. So, when you're looking at a surfactant, for example, you might care a lot about whether it's toxic to aquatic ecosystems, whether if it got into a lake or a river, it would cause problems with that aquatic ecosystem. You might also care whether it biodegrades rapidly or not, since, if it got into that aquatic ecosystem, you would want to know whether it disappeared quickly, whether it degraded quickly or whether it remained for a long time. Those two attributes happen to be the key attributes that we should care about for surfactants. For solvents, we might care about different attributes or more attributes.

What we see our job in this database to help companies understand, when we're looking at a surfactant chemical, what are the key attributes you should care about if you're looking to create a green cleaning product that includes that surfactant?

The way that I describe this to a layperson, often, is it's a little bit like the difference between the Good Housekeeping seal of approval approach and the Consumer Reports approach. Where a Good Housekeeping seal of approval might try to tell you whether a chemical is good or not, we try to tell you for each chemical that you're looking to possibly use in your product, what are the things you should care about, and how did each of the chemicals that are currently listed on our database perform in the attributes that you would care about?